Counter Strike 2: Valve stops relentless abuse of game mechanics

For more than two decades, Counter Strike has provided an elite competitive experience, shaped by millions of players from around the world. For many older players, this series marked growing up and filled the arcades with unforgettable moments. And now it's time, as they say from the Valve development team, to start the next chapter in the story of the CS franchise.

Counter Strike 2 was released last year in September as the successor to Counter Strike: Global Offensive. It currently has over 1 million and 50 thousand active players. CS2 brings us vivid graphics, a new particle system such as smoke, fire and explosion, a new sound reproduction system, a new user interface (loadoutinterface), as well as many improvements on new and old maps. Thanks for all the improvements go to the powerful and new Source 2 Engine - a private game development platform. Counter Strike 2 is free to download. Users who already have CS can easily update to CS2.

However, currently one of the biggest problems that players of the Counter Strike franchise are facing are cheaters. The problem is so great that most players report that in almost every match they play, there is some cheater who mercilessly abuses the game's mechanics. Unfortunately, cheats can be found on the Internet and some of them are completely free. In addition to all that, certain players stream playing the Counter Strike series with embedded cheats and are not sanctioned. As the gaming community points out, fair play has lost its charm, the joy of playing matches has been bled away by dishonest players who use banned programs to gain an advantage in the game. Until now.

A new wave of change

The company Valve, which is behind the titles Counter Strike, DOTA and the Steam platform, announced two weeks ago that the implementation of a new anti-cheat system is underway, which, looking at the statistics, has performed quite well.

Namely, in the first week since Valve activated its VAC anti-cheat, the number of banned players (players who no longer have access to the game) increased significantly. In the first day since the system was activated, over 900 accounts and players were banned. This significant jump is an indication that Valve cares about its players and that there are even more layers of security brewing in the background.

It would be naive to say that this is the ultimate solution and that from now on, cheaters will no longer exist. On the contrary, as they add from Valve, this is a "cat and mouse" game. When a company releases a new software solution to a problem, the development team behind the malware searches again for another problem and exploits the opportunities.

How does VAC Anticheat work?

It is very difficult to make good software that regulates cheaters without being a risk to user privacy.

Unlike similar competitive games like Valorant, VAC Anti-cheat does not use the so-called kernel level approach. The kernel is the core of the operating system, and any program running within the kernel level of access has much greater control over processes.

To make things more coherent, any anti-cheat that works at the kernel level has access to everything you do on your computer - for only one goal: to make the detection as good as possible.

When Valorant's system first hit the market it was the subject of controversial debate. VALVE's core values ​​oppose the creation of such an anti-cheat. But that's why they point out that they want to turn to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Their system is based on:

to VACnet which consists of a server farm with over (3,456 processors). This system observes every competitive match and performs analysis from each player's perspective during the game to check if there is anything out of the ordinary.

Overwatch is the ability in Counter Strike 2 for players to look at matches of other users and thereby assess the chance of whether someone is abusing the mechanics of the game or not.

Why is it so hard to catch rogue players?

Any "built-in" spin-bot detection leads to a cat-and-mouse race with cheat developers - if they can find the limits of the heuristics they use to detect cheating, the problem returns. Instead, Valve is working on a solution that involves machine learning that is constantly being improved so that it can classify and draw a clear parallel between a cheater and normal/highly skilled players.

Can the players finally relax?

A brief look at the potential that Valve offers is ultimately very positive, however, in practice, players have a slightly different story to tell. The Counter Strike community points out that as much as the problems are being solved, it is still not enough to restore the balance of fair play.

There will always be cheaters, as long as the game itself, however, what is important is that a big move has been made when it comes to sanctions.